


Volunteer Wildflowers

by sanerontheinside



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Imperial Years, Jedha, Nuclear Winter, Post-Rogue One
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-26
Updated: 2017-02-26
Packaged: 2018-09-26 23:47:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9933239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanerontheinside/pseuds/sanerontheinside
Summary: A Jedi Master, a survivor of the Purges, settles down for a bit of gardening in a desert wasteland.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Prompted by an anon on tumblr: 'Volunteer Wildflowers'. 
> 
> Other original characters referenced are part of a larger, long-term project which may or may not ever see the light of day. (Or at least some part of it would, but my beta has a life. Which is a shame, really, because I wrote 3 whole chapters of it for a very old prompt—one of my first, actually—hey kenope if you're reading this, :P ) 
> 
> _Anyway._
> 
> Please enjoy a supercentenarian Jedi Master trying to figure out his place in the Universe some 20 years after the destruction of the Order.

In the lower levels of the Coruscant Temple there was a garden; peaceful under the quiet, almost heavy layers of the Force, beautiful and complicated, full of riddles and winding paths and puzzles that never looked quite the same any time you saw them. 

It was a labour of love, both a memory immortalised and an offering to the rest of the Temple, so its creator never considered his name to be particularly important—not attached to the garden, anyway. It didn’t seem important then. Or perhaps it would have revealed far more about the creator than he was comfortable with. 

It certainly wasn’t important now, when that garden lay in ruins.   


 

* * *

 

The ship circled once, twice, around the crater in the wasteland. A smaller shuttle rattled, securely parked in the hold, creaks and groans adding to the eerie feeling that was trying to crawl up the pilot’s spine. “Well, this is it,” he grumbled. “Look, are you sure you want to be here?” 

His passenger didn’t look sure. He looked like he was pressing himself back, neck arched uncomfortably into the headrest, hands clawing into the soft seat and the arm. They were flying smoothly enough, yet he still looked like he was fighting a losing battle against motion sickness. 

“Just—set me down and I’ll figure it out,” he suggested tightly. 

“I won’t wait for you,” the pilot warned, a nervous edge bleeding into his tone entirely against his will. 

The man—old, thin, but with a clever light in his eyes—shot him a sharp look. “There’s no need,” he murmured. “What is it?”

The pilot looked straight ahead again, swallowed down his nerves once, twice. “I can hear them,” he said, half-hoping his companion would miss his whispered words. He didn’t think he’d spoken all that loudly, but he couldn’t really tell with the screaming in his ears. 

“Me too,” the passenger said softly. At the pilot’s startled look, he gave him a half-shrug and a wry smile. 

The pilot blinked, nodded. It was a relief to hear he wasn’t crazy, or at least that he wasn’t the only one. “And you still want to stay here?”

The man sighed. “I have work to do here,” he said, but did not elaborate. 

The pilot restrained himself to raised eyebrows and a shake of the head. “All right then. Tell me where to set you down.”

“North lip of the crater there, by the water.” 

“It’s cold out there, old man. Don’t freeze.”  


 

* * *

 

Jedha was a desert moon, or at least it was supposed to be. But here, shining pools in a crater betrayed a presence of water, the potential for life in the midst of a wasteland. The pools were fringed with ice, and the wind was almost cutting, tearing across the flat landscape with nothing to slow it down. But the wind would pass, eventually. The man ignored it for now as he stood and looked around, then tipped his head back and looked up at the stars. 

The crater was what remained of the Holy City of NiJedha, the Temple of the Whills, the crystal mines. The Death Star’s successful weapons test had raised massive clouds of dust and soot and sand, setting off a several-degree generous drop in temperature of the moon’s atmosphere. 

It had also buried the crystal mine, and uncovered an aquifer. 

When Senator Mon Mothma had first asked him if there was anything that could be done for Jedha’s moon, he’d simply stared at her, dumbfounded. At the time, he hadn’t been sure what her question meant—did she want him to rebuild NiJedha, or was she simply asking for future reference, to rebuild any cities destroyed as a ‘warning’. His mind spun out of control—Jedha was a desert moon, it wasn’t a model for any planet where there was any kind of suspected or rumoured Rebel presence, not really. 

He came back to the sense of a hand resting gently on his forearm. “The average temperature of the moon has dropped several degrees, what life there was on it is struggling to survive. Most of the Jedhan population is leaving. I want to know if it’s at all possible to help them restore the moon to livable conditions.” 

He’d blinked at her owlishly, then snorted. “It’s a bloody desert, Senator. And it screams. No one who returns to the Holy City will ever be able to ignore those screams.”

But in the end he’d agreed. He still wasn’t sure why. No being in their sixteenth decade should be so foolish. 

The hum of the kyber far beneath his feet somewhere was a little reassuring. Even in spite of the Empire’s abuse, the strip-mining, the weapons test, something had survived here, and persisted. (Scientists could yell at him as much as they liked, but no one had yet managed to convince him that kyber or Ilum crystals weren’t at least a little bit alive.) 

He pulled in a deep breath of achingly cold air, huffed it out sharply, and walked back to his small shuttle. Pulling off thick gloves and sealing the compartment, he steeled himself and gave the engines a gentle nudge, guiding his affectionately-named _Bucket_  (for rust-bucket) over the lip of the crater and down into the depths.   


 

* * *

 

There was less wind here. He almost wanted to call it a valley: there was so much potential around these half-frozen pools of water, his entire being ached with it—ached to _see_ it. 

The entire galaxy seemed a little lighter these days, with the death of the Emperor. Of course, that didn’t mean the death of the Empire, unfortunately. But the Empire had no further use for Jedha, and he was content to stay here, quietly tinkering away in his shuttle. Soil samples, air quality, ultraviolet radiation—samples, readings upon readings, data-data-data.  ****They were a welcome distraction from the near-constant screaming, even if they weren’t enough of one.

Sometimes, as he moved from place to place, one voice might become more distinct from the chorus. It sent cold prickling down his spine, colder than the wind even as it cut through his layers. He couldn’t bear it. It was too much like what he’d already heard once, on Kashyyyk. Sixty-Six might have been decades ago, but time didn’t dull the pain of it all that well.

Almost reflexively, he apologised. He didn’t even realise he was doing it, but he found himself muttering as he went, over and over, _you will be remembered._

Not like there was anyone else left to say it, anyway. 

A few days’ traveling through the crater and around it revealed that, indeed, there were few species that had borne the cold well. He saved what he could of the frostbitten plants, found that they did well in the _Bucket’s_ small storage room. Unfortunately, he realised, he might still have to supplement the population with something else, some sort of introduced species. He wasn’t fond of that—one never knew if an introduced species would remain so, or become dangerously invasive. But that was a question for another time. 

 _What will you do now, Master?_ A memory floated up to the surface, of his last Padawan; golden-eyed and golden-haired, clever, if almost always silent. He’d died a young Knight, before the Republic fell, and his Master often thanked the Force the boy had never seen the Order’s destruction, or the decades of suffering that followed. 

 _Beat the clouds,_ he’d answered then, with a smirk. 

Seed the clouds, really. Try to bring all that unsettled dust back to the ground. Make rain. 

It was much easier these days. He could make an orbit of the moon through its atmosphere and cover all the ground he needed. It gave him a strange sensation of power, working with environments like this. He’d never had to care for an entire moon, and he’d rarely had to work alone, but that was a long time ago. 

A long time ago, he’d been pulled every which way, tending to the scorched grounds of Felucia, whispering fondly to the Mon Cal corals, overseeing efforts on AgriCorp worlds. The Council hadn’t cared how he got things done, merely that they were done. It was easy for anyone to dismiss him as a paltry example of a Jedi Master, a researcher with no practical experience, but he knew how to work this landscape in his very bones. The Force sang it to him.   


 

* * *

 

He passed along messages, requests for what he needed, through pilots as skittish as the one who’d brought him here.  ****Yet, invariably the answer always came with what he'd asked for.

Many, many years ago he’d constructed a garden in the Temple’s lower levels. This was far different, less structured, not rigidly maintained. This was meant to be wild. While he nursed the atmosphere back to somewhat more normal, he carefully re-introduced some of his plants. He wrapped them carefully, insulating them against too-cold temperatures, guarded them against the persistent damp—rather unlike Jedha’s normal climate. 

In the end, he would have been willing to admit defeat. None of the species native to Jedha were suited to such conditions. But as he sorted through the small greenhouse-cabin of his shuttle, pruning some of the survivors, repotting others, a small, purple-flowering clump snagged his attention. 

It caught him entirely by surprise. “Hello there, you little thing,” he whispered, “how did you get aboard with me? I must be getting old,” he joked, for the joke only grew funnier with every year he passed one-hundred fifty. “Where are you from?” 

He really had no idea, he realised with a twinge of regret. Once, his record-keeping had been flawless—before the war, of course. Then, Master Haldane Juo had had a name, and a Padawan, and sometimes a Knight partner, and occasionally someone wanted him—called for him by name—to speak to some tech or overseer in the AgriCorps. 

He stared at the nameless plant in his hands, thinking of how that violet colour matched the eyes of his Padawan’s agemate, whom Zeka had irretrievably fallen for. Those smooth leaves marked it a succulent, and the corner he’d kept it in marked it hardy, one that could survive and flourish in a wide range of temperatures, but most of the cold. Colder, even, than Jedha had been. From what he could tell, it didn’t grow or spread very fast. Its preferred soil type was just close enough, at that. 

“Ah well,” he sighed. “I suppose it can’t hurt to try with you. Come on,” he picked up the pot, snipped away a few cuttings, and separated them, encouraging them over the next several days to root and grow. 

“Did you know,” he mused at it, “this place, it used to be the Holy City, NiJedha. Somewhere around here, there were caves full of kyber crystals that the Empire strip-mined. I suppose there must have been an aquifer below—no other reason for the puddles in the crater here.” 

He sighed, sitting back to look at his cuttings. They weren’t doing too badly. 

“Where is your home, your real home, little one?” He reached out, brushing light fingers over small dark leaves. They told him nothing, and the Force gave no hints. “You would have liked her, the one with eyes the colour of your flowers. I did. She brought my Padawan to me, the sneaky creature,” he grinned, “fell out of one of the Archive shelves.” 

Later she, too, had traveled to starved and war-torn planets—long before the Galactic War, even—and set up field hospitals, earned herself a following of loyal, orphaned children. Force, but she’d even laid claim to a decent corner of black market trade, procuring supplies and medications for Mid-Rim worlds the Senate had neither the time nor the resources to care for. Crazy, for a Jedi. Crafty, for the Shadow she became. 

Haldane wondered what she might be up to now. If she’d even survived. 

“She didn’t think herself a Jedi then, you know,” he told his plants, skipping over so much of the story, polished away to smoothness in a well-trod part of his mind. “They weren’t very happy about her Knighting.” 

He leaned back in his seat, as far as his cramped workplace would allow, looking troubled. He only let himself look so old and so worn where no one could see—which, on Jedha, seemed to mean only in the safety and privacy of his shuttle. His hair was long, grease-streaked silver and grey where he’d absently swiped his hands after fiddling with one of the _Bucket’s_ motors. His skin, once bronzed, had darkened, wrinkled and gone mottled with spots. But his eyes were yet sharp and brown, near-black. 

“See, here’s the trouble I have,” he said at last, still talking to the cuttings quietly arranged in front of him. “Here we have a child taken from a slave world, brought to the Temple, raised to believe she wanted nothing more than to become a Jedi. Then, she is lost. When she comes home, the Council turns her out again. For at least another decade she wanders the world believing she’ll never get her Knighthood, and what does she do? She does what any Jedi would do: she heals the worlds she finds are broken.” 

He crossed his arms over his chest with a disgruntled sigh, threw his legs up on a nearby stool, and went on. “Now look at us. In another decade and a half our home was destroyed. We were hunted, slaughtered. They destroyed even those who were like us,” he waved a hand vaguely upward, at the _Bucket’s_ hull. “There is so little left of us.” 

Haldane let his head drop forward until his chin rested on his chest. For a long time—so long that he might have fallen asleep—he just breathed. 

“What are we left with? We had faith in the Force, in the Order, in each other, and none of it saved us. Yet a child more a Jedi than half the ones I’ve ever met did more for people the Order would never have helped without any faith in us at all. Sometimes, I think, she barely had faith in the Force. When you strip away the Order, the company of your own family, when even the Force doesn’t respond to your call quite like it used to, it’s hard to have faith in any of it.” 

 _So then, what had she believed in?_  


 

* * *

 

In a few tens, once he was sure his cuttings would survive in the harsh conditions outside, he went out and planted a few. Then he sat down, crosslegged, beside them.

“I suppose I should name you,” he murmured, watching a faint breath of wind stir the leaves gently. “Wouldn’t do to expect you to flourish without a name.”

But in truth he’d spent so long pondering it—ever since he’d discovered that little plant hiding in the corner of his ‘greenroom’. Or, at least, while he hadn’t been distracted pondering his own place in the universe, or the lack thereof.

“I suppose,” he began softly, then broke off and looked up at the night sky. For the first time since he’d arrived, he could actually see stars, not just a blanket of clouds, overhead. “Out there, there are any number of worlds whose people are either entirely naïve of the Force or treat it solely as a religion. They believe in gods and beasts, some of them—in their ancestors, even.”

Haldane hung his head and chuckled. “Well. I suppose it’s better to start small, then, hm? For instance,” he leaned forward, closer to the little tufts he’d planted, “I believe in the potential this frosty damned wasteland has, and I’d really appreciate it if you little buggers didn’t fail me, understood?”

He felt more than a bit silly, really. One-hundred fifty-seven years young, muttering at his succulents. So he snickered; and then snorted, and then couldn’t help the full-throated laugh that threw his head back again.

“Sorry, sorry,” he sputtered through tears, “that was a long time coming. Oh, ye gods! Ha! What gods.” His face twisted in a sudden grimace and he shoved the thought away. “Never mind. Well. A name, right? That’s what I was meant to be doing.”

 _It’s too quiet,_ he thought. _I’ll go mad here._

“She said they called her _Shar’ii,_ meaning Bright Star. Said it had something to do with hope. Good as any name for you, since right about now looks like you’re this planet’s best hope. And don’t give me that look!” He menaced the plants, still laughing at himself. “You’ll have to live with it.”

With a breathy sigh he finally picked himself up, groaning a bit—the cold ground was no good place for old bones to rest, and his complaints filled the silence well enough. He shuffled stiffly back to the _Bucket,_ humming an old crèche tune as he went. Huffing slightly, he laid a hand on the hull when he finally reached his shuttle and stopped to breathe in the air again. The quality of it had certainly gone up since he’d arrived.

 _So quiet,_ he mused, _even peaceful,_ then frowned in confusion.

_What happened to all the screaming?_

There wasn’t even a hint of it. _Funny, that._ Haldane shrugged, and quickly trudged back into his ship.

 

A few months later, the giant caldera had become an oasis, pools fringed with green and tufts of purple-flowering _Shar’ii._


End file.
